RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)

  • Bessent, Trump urge ending the Senate filibuster

    Source: United Press International

    “President Donald Trump and Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent urged an end to the Senate filibuster rule ahead of an anticipated budget battle in January. Bessent submitted an op-ed that The Washington Post published on Saturday and blames Senate Democrats and the filibuster for blocking passage of a resolution to keep the federal government open while negotiating the 2026 fiscal year budget and causing a record 43-day shutdown of the federal government. … Senate Democrats control 47 seats, including two occupied by independents who caucus with Senate Democrats, while the GOP controls 53 seats, so neither party can overcome the filibuster rule without help from the other.” (12/27/25)

    https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2025/12/27/senate-filibuster/8511766875059/

  • UK: Lloyds shuts invoice financing service as small businesses feel squeeze

    Source: Financial Times [UK]

    “Lloyds Banking Group is shutting an invoice financing service for small business customers as the UK’s biggest lenders pivot to focus on more lucrative corporate clients. The UK’s biggest high street bank will close its invoice factoring service by the end of the year, according to two people familiar with the matter, in a blow to small enterprise customers operating on thin margins. The move to end the service, under which Lloyds buys unpaid invoices from small businesses in return for the right to receive the payments from their customers, follows similar closures by other top lenders. It comes as businesses confront rising costs after increases in the minimum wage and successive tax-raising budgets by chancellor Rachel Reeves.” (12/28/25)

    https://archive.is/fTmcp

  • State of emergency declared in New York, New Jersey as US storm disrupts thousands of flights

    Source: Sky News [UK]

    “A powerful winter storm has disrupted one of the busiest travel weekends of the year in New York City and northeastern US. Around 4in of snow fell in New York City on Saturday, although many roads were cleared by Saturday morning. Still, the storm has caused significant disruptions to holiday travel, with at least 1,500 flights cancelled or delayed since Friday night, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware. … New York and New Jersey were put under states of emergency. … San Francisco and Orlando experienced travel delays, as snow began falling on Friday at Newark Liberty International Airport.” (12/28/25)

    https://news.sky.com/story/state-of-emergency-declared-as-us-storm-disrupts-hundreds-of-flights-13487704

  • Thai, Cambodian regimes sign new ceasefire deal to end weeks of border fighting

    Source: CBC News [UK state media]

    “Thailand and Cambodia on Saturday signed a ceasefire agreement to end weeks of armed combat along their border over competing claims to territory. It took effect at noon local time. In addition to ending fighting, the agreement calls for no further military movements and no violations of either side’s airspace for military purposes. Only Thailand had employed airstrikes in the fighting, hitting sites in Cambodia as recently as Saturday morning, according to Cambodia’s Defence Ministry.” (12/27/25)

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/thailand-cambodia-border-clashes-ceasefire-agreement-9.7028492


  • 2026 Pessimism: Put Not Your Trust in Midterms

    Source: Garrison Center
    by Thomas L. Knapp

    “We live in the age of the permanent campaign, and everywhere I turn I see Democrats, actual Republicans (as opposed to Trumpists), and supposed ‘independents’ looking forward to next November’s midterm congressional elections with hope, even excitement: Democrats will take the US Senate and the House, they hope, thwarting Donald Trump’s policy agenda. The odds are not with those hopes or that excitement. … Government THROUGH politics is not going to get us out of the mess we’ve been putting and keeping ourselves in WITH politics for more than a century now.” (12/27/25)

    https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20214

  • GOP battles show a party heading deeper into fever swamps

    Source: Orange County Register
    by Steven Greenhut

    “The Republican Party that I joined in the 1980s (and later left) espoused a straightforward set of principles. It believed in free markets, limited government, peace through strength in dealing with international aggressors, and ‘traditional’ values. Sure, the last one was nebulous and the party often was hypocritical, but these core ideas were the key to its eventual resurgence. … Engaging in nostalgia is a hazard of growing older, but one need not be misty-eyed to compare that Grand Old Party to the current freak show. Sure, Democrats were pretty awful during that era (and embraced views surprisingly common in Republican circles today) and largely remain so, but the GOP was the voice of sanity. With the GOP’s dark and nasty pivot, advocates for those age-old ideals have nowhere to turn.” (12/26/25)

    https://archive.is/7P41F

  • The Regulator War of 1771: A Forgotten Rebellion Against Corruption

    Source: Tenth Amendment Center
    by Joe Wolverton, II

    “There are many events in the history of the formation of this Republic that go unnoticed, unremembered, and unheralded. Today is a chance to remedy that and remember the Regulators. As if cut from today’s headlines, patriot farmers and small ranchers in North and South Carolina led a rebellion against armed government officials trying to exercise control over western lands. History has dubbed the uprising the War of the Regulation, the final battle of which happened on May 16 in 1771. The West in this case, of course, was not Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, but the rural counties of the Carolina backcountry. Historian James Whittenburg described the events as ‘the last and greatest of the social upheavals’ that led to the War for Independence.” (12/27/25)

    https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2025/12/27/the-regulator-war-of-1771-a-forgotten-rebellion-against-corruption/

  • US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack

    Source: Wired
    by Cory Doctorow

    “In 2026, the leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs. A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a period of rising prices, no matter what the cause. Luckily for the political fortunes of the world’s leaders, there is a better way to respond to tariffs. Tit-for-tat tariffs are a 19th-century tactic, and we live in a 21st-century world — a world where the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable US companies are all vulnerable to a simple legal change that will make things cheaper for billions of people, all over the world, including in the US, at the expense of the companies whose CEOs posed with Trump on the inaugural dais.” (12/26/25)

    https://archive.is/FbldE

  • The Miseducation of America

    Source: Town Hall
    by Mark Lewis

    “I think we would all agree that education is one of the most important facets of any society. I’m not just talking about ‘going to school;’ there is much more to education than that. Education can even begin in the womb, and takes off from birth. Everything we are surrounded by ‘educates’ us, in one way or another — for good or ill. Not all education is ‘good.’ It should be unnecessary to say that. People can only know and act upon what they have been taught. If people don’t know what ‘freedom’ and ‘tyranny’ are — and the source of both — then they will not know how to protect the former and guard against the latter.” (12/26/25)

    https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2025/12/26/the-miseducation-of-america-n2668494

  • The Leverage Tinderbox: How Geopolitics and Open Interest Fueled the Largest Wipeouts Ever

    Source: Bitcoin.com
    by Terence Zimwara

    “The start of the second Trump administration in January brought optimism that the crypto economy was headed for better times. During the run-up to the November 2024 U.S. elections, Donald Trump had pledged to eliminate the Biden administration’s anti- crypto policies and end government ‘lawfare’ against crypto entrepreneurs. It was hardly a surprise that bitcoin and a wave of altcoins surged in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory and the pro- crypto Republican Party’s consolidation of power in Congress. … Yet the rally soon gave way to the darker side of crypto’s DNA: volatility. The months that followed reminded traders that parabolic gains are often followed by brutal corrections.” (12/27/25)

    https://news.bitcoin.com/the-leverage-tinderbox-how-geopolitics-and-open-interest-fueled-the-largest-wipeouts-ever/

  • Lewis and Tolkien at War

    Source: Law & Liberty
    by Graham McAleer

    “Their battlefield experiences informed a ‘literary counteroffensive’ against the grim ideologies of the twentieth century.” (12/26/25)

    https://lawliberty.org/book-review/lewis-and-tolkien-at-war/

  • Washington May Need to Deal With a Nuclear Japan

    Source: The American Conservative
    by Ted Galen Carpenter

    “U.S. administrations even have a long history of discouraging America’s technologically capable, firmly democratic allies from crossing the nuclear weapons threshold. Washington has not been shy about pressuring (if not outright bullying) Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to foreswear building independent nuclear weapons capabilities instead relying totally on the United States for deterrence. A similar hostility has been directed toward any manifestations of interest in a nuclear deterrent by Germany and Washington’s other European allies. At the very least, it is time for U.S. leaders to review that rigid policy and carefully reconsider its various implications. Japanese who want their country to reduce or eliminate its total dependence on the United States for nuclear deterrence are not being reckless or unreasonable, given the realities of today’s regional and global security environments.” (12/27/25)

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/washington-may-need-to-deal-with-a-nuclear-japan/